Orders of Love
Family Constellations is a highly effective way of healing on a deeply felt energetic level, with long-term and often life changing results.

In working with several thousand family systems, renowned German psychotherapist, philosopher and author Bert Hellinger discovered age-old, hidden “Orders of Love” that operate in the depths of family organisms. Violation and disrespect of these natural laws due to tragic circumstances and unconscious behavior in the generations that came before affect the lives of later members of the family.

Workshop participants are frequently amazed and deeply touched when the hidden love connections and entanglements within their systems are revealed.
~Brigitte Stzab

“Orders of Love” is the term Bert Hellinger first used to describe natural laws that guide and influence our lives. These laws are operating all the time in the individual, family and collective soul: Parents give and children take; Everyone belongs in the family; Hierarchy exists according to tme (e.g., grandparents were born before parents, parents were born before children; birth order, spouse order, for those who marry more than once).
~Lisa Iversen, MSW, LCSW

Overview
Family Constellations is a deeply experiential method of helping individuals, couples, and families resolve issues in a gentle, powerful and non-judgmental manner. This method was developed over twenty years ago by a German psychotherapist named Bert Hellinger. This approach helps reveal the hidden dynamics which surround personal and professional issues.

It is recognized that our deepest attachments are to our personal family systems including 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations previous to our own. Through a loyalty and love to this family system problems and patterns can be seen in these generations. The constellations work can help address these entanglements and potentially resolve them to bring more peace and power to our lives today.

Our work place relationships and difficulties can often be traced back to an origin in our family system. This process is ideal for improving all love relationships, between partners, parents and children, siblings and also adopted, blended families. It is a very powerful way of clearing and resolving old relationships so that one can get on with one’s life.
~Therese Thomas

Origins and Evolution
Constellations work is an experiential therapeutic modality pioneered in the 1980′s by German Psychoanalyst Bert Hellinger. Hellinger was influenced in part by his 16 years as a missionary with the Zulu in South Africa, particularly by their habits of acknowledging generations of ancestors upon introducing themselves and healing through community “ritual”.

While Hellinger’s work originally focused mainly on healing within the family of origin (the most common source of individual and interpersonal issues) Constellation work itself has spread throughout the world and grown to address issues that manifest in any kind of system, such as those existing among co-workers, multi-partnered or blended families, sports teams or housemates, for example, or on even larger scales such as between political parties, movements or nations.

Over the years Hellinger’s own focus has moved increasingly into what he called “movements of the soul” and into what he now considers “movements of the spirit”. The dynamics at play in any family system are reflected in the many levels of our being, from personal to interpersonal to transpersonal. While family constellations focus on the dynamics of the family system, I believe that Hellinger’s “movements of the spirit” address a much larger system in which similar principles of systemic dynamics apply.

Many forms of the work have evolved to address internal systems as well. Constellations can be very effective in addressing issues that arise between various aspects of the Self, such as heart, body and mind, or even among the Traditional Chinese 5 elements of the human system. Constellations can be helpful on other abstract levels too. Setting up a ‘dilemma’ or ‘trilemma’ constellation to look at the hidden dynamics at play in your situation with a new and broader perspective can help in making important life decisions.
~ Kirsten Lauzon

Applications
The potential for exploration through Family and Systemic Constellations is far reaching. For example, in my workshops we explore: family relationships (where most of our behavior has been formed unconsciously), other systems, such as businesses or organizations, our own inner workings, such as the different parts of ourselves that form our personality. These parts create the continuous inner war we experience, the polarities of life, such as good/bad, love/hate, health/illness, and light/darkness. Here we can learn that they are not contradictory, but complementary! The understanding that arises from this discovery is transformational.
~Subhan Schenker